Second International

Second International, also called Socialist International, federation of socialist parties and trade unions that greatly influenced the ideology, policy, and methods of the European labour movement from the last decade of the 19th century to the beginning of World War I.

The Second International was founded at a congress in Paris in 1889. Unlike the First International, it was based on the membership of national parties and trade unions only. It was not a centralized organization, like the first, but rather a loose federation that did not set up an executive body, the International Socialist Bureau, until 11 years after its foundation. Its headquarters was in Brussels, where the second congress of the International met in 1891. The congresses met in a number of cities at various intervals, not on a yearly basis. By 1912 the Second International represented the socialist and social democratic parties of all European countries, the United States, Canada, and Japan, with a voting strength of nearly nine million. Although it had no mandatory power, it was recognized by its member parties as their highest moral authority.

The Second International stood for parliamentary democracy and finally, at its London Congress in 1896, expelled from its ranks the anarchists, who opposed it. Yet, after much debate, the Second International rejected the theory of the gradual achievement of socialism and cooperation with nonsocialist parties in office, and it reaffirmed the Marxist doctrine of the class struggle and the inevitability of revolution. Its main concern, however, was the prevention of a general European war. After extended debate it rejected the use of a general strike to ward off the imminent danger of a general European war. It demanded the introduction of compulsory courts of arbitration for the settlement of disputes between nations; and the reduction of armaments with total disarmament as the ultimate aim. In a resolution drafted by Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and L. Martov and adopted by its Stuttgart Congress in 1907, however, the International pledged its member parties in belligerent countries to use the social and economic crisis brought about by war to promote social revolution.

The power groupings in World War I confronted the socialist parties in the belligerent countries with a dilemma. With the exception of the Serbian and Russian socialists, all such parties supported the war efforts of their respective countries. This situation split the International: a growing minority within these parties rebuked the majority for its desertion of the antiwar principles of the Second International. At a conference held in Zimmerwald, Switz., in 1915, these “Internationalists” called for an immediate cessation of the war and for peace negotiations based on the principle of “no annexations, no indemnities.” The minority socialists opposed to the war were themselves divided, however; a “left” group led by Lenin urged an effort to transform the imperialist war into a transnational class war and opposed a revival of the Second International, which had by then ceased to function.

In an attempt to reconstruct the Second International after the war, a commission of socialist leaders in the Allied countries convened a congress of the International at Geneva in 1920. When this congress met, however, only a small fraction of the prewar membership of the Second International attended. The rift in the international socialist movement, produced by dissensions over the war policy pursued by the majority of the socialist parties, and their hostility to the Bolshevik Revolution, which had aroused the sympathy of many workers, had destroyed the common ground for the reinstitution of the Second International.